Live review: Tame Impala begins Australian Slow Rush tour with a confetti blast of euphoria
A lab-coated ‘scientist’ used a giant screen to advise the crowd to take our ‘Rushium’ medication, if we hadn’t already | LIVE REVIEW
In the forecourt outside the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Tuesday night, scores of young people queued to have their photograph taken at the foot of an oversized prescription bottle for a medication named ‘Rushium’, as part of a clinical trial run by Tame Impala. Several metres high, the inflatable bottle was notably empty, as if its contents had been gobbled up by an enthusiastic user now in need of a refill.
Inside the venue, as 9pm approached and the house lights went dark, a lab-coat-clad scientist appeared on a giant screen as wide as the stage to advise the 11,500 concert attendees to take our Rushium, if we hadn’t already. She noted that the pharmaceutical company was committed to “time therapy and treatment”, and that its effects – including “a minor expansion to large time collapses” – can last for up to 48 hours.
Then her face and voice began to shimmer and distort, leaving only her gleaming white teeth visible on the big screen. Just as it was beginning to give off the sickly rumblings of a drug trip gone bad, out walked a group of musicians to the pop music equivalent of a hero’s welcome.
Here to play songs from its chart-topping 2020 album The Slow Rush at long last was Tame Impala, the award-winning solo project by a West Australian songwriter named Kevin Parker that has become one of the nation’s most popular musical exports.
First booked for April 2020, this run of homeland concert dates was rescheduled several times due to the pandemic. When Tame Impala – which expands to a five-piece band in the live setting – returned to the road in September last year, Covid vaccinations were a hot topic of conversation, as well as a prerequisite for ticketholders to enter many entertainment venues.
Back then, 18 months into the pandemic, the giant Rushium prop and pre-show video must have hit different to still-rattled gig-goers slowly returning to normality.
In October 2022, about 60 shows into a tour that has seen the band perform to hundreds of thousands of people, it felt like a cute gag and relic from a time we’re all happy to have moved past, though the merchandise desk was doing a roaring trade in Rushium-branded clothing items.
The pharmaceutical concept was an effective scene-setter for the music Parker creates as Tame Impala, which began as a Fremantle bedroom project 15 years ago with clear psychedelic rock influences, including the usual mood-altering substances often associated with both creating, and listening to, such music.
Across the years, as Parker’s audience has grown, his sound has since evolved into a unique amalgam of pop, rock, electronic and dance styles, often backed by drumbeats heavily rooted in the bombast of hip-hop, the genre that has been the most dominant and popular art form in popular music for more than a decade.
Accordingly, the 105-minute concert – the first of a six-date Australian tour that will mark the end of its world tour – showcased a rare ability to shift the mood from rock show to nightclub and back again, sometimes in the space of a single song.
The Slow Rush is a work whose lyrical themes are rooted in Parker’s obsession with the passage of time, and the strong undercurrent of nostalgia – both in its pleasant and painful senses – he feels acutely as an artist, and threads through his work.
Now 36, and a recent father himself, the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist is likely older than many of the people who buy tickets to his concerts, yet the nature of his work – which draws from the timeless smarts of 1960s-era pop as much as it does more recent sonic palettes – means it has broad appeal.
Songs from the newest work dominated the setlist, with seven tracks including the same bookends as the album in opener One More Year and closer One More Hour.
It was a thrill to hear these expansive and absorbing works in the live environment, surrounded by other fans. Released in February 2020, The Slow Rush became the unintended yet strangely apt lockdown soundtrack of choice for millions of listeners around the world, this writer included; later that year, it was the runaway winner at the 2020 ARIA Awards, where it won five trophies including album of the year, adding to Parker’s hefty stockpile of accolades.
The set drew from all four Tame Impala albums, though just one from its 2010 debut Innerspeaker in the late-set noodly jam Runway, Houses, City, Clouds, which was the only time that the energy in the room notably dipped, even as Parker took his one and only electric guitar solo.
Given the insular, solitary origins of his music-making, it’s understandable that Parker has been slow to warm to the demands of the frontman role.
This is still the same guy who named an early single Solitude Is Bliss, and his second album Lonerism, while continuing to refer to himself as “a loner in L.A.” on more recent single Borderline. Introversion is in-built, and even accruing 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify – as he has today – can’t change that.
In past viewings dating back to 2009, Parker was rarely less than awkward and shy on stage, and usually gave the impression he’d much rather shut up, keep his eyes hidden behind his long hair, and concentrate on playing the right notes, audience be damned.
That drive for aural perfection is undoubtedly still present, and his meticulous care for all aspects of Tame Impala’s sound is evident in the strong team built around him, from the four musicians who have each played alongside him for a decade or more – plus an occasional sixth member on percussion – to the expert ears charged with handling a live mix that was never less than fulsome and effective.
But the uncertain, self-conscious performer of a decade ago has been superseded by a confident master of ceremonies whose first words into the microphone were to hype up the capacity crowd, and whose heartfelt thanks were expressed often.
Parker isn’t quite a showman, but he has clearly grown much more comfortable with the demands of the job – unavoidable, in a way, given that he is now well-established at playing to massive crowds at some of the world’s biggest festivals.
For the most part, Tame Impala’s music is dense, layered and complex, and it was a joy to see these musicians pull it off with the vitality and seriousness these works demanded.
Early on, when introducing Breathe Deeper, Parker said, “The last time we were in Brisbane, this song did not exist.” More than perhaps any other song in the set, its ever-shifting beats showcased Parker’s freakish knack for writing ear-catching drum parts.
At the same time, that track highlighted how French-born drummer Julien Barbagallo has been saddled with something akin to the late Taylor Hawkins’s role in the Foo Fighters, where the guy singing and playing guitar out front could just as easily have been driving the rhythm from behind the kit.
Kevin Parker is no Dave Grohl – far fewer expletives fly from his mouth into the microphone, for starters – but given Barbagello has been playing the frontman’s unique beats in concert for a decade now, it’s clear that a great trust and respect flows between them. Same goes for bassist Cam Avery, a masterful rhythmic anchor, while flanking Parker were Dominic Simper and Jay Watson, who regularly switched their focus between synthesisers and guitars.
About 30 minutes into the concert, the full scale of its production was triggered during Apocalypse Dreams, when a huge ring that had hung ominously overhead was lit, then lowered while belching a plume of smoke that briefly obscured the stage entirely. As the musicians lost themselves amid an extended instrumental outro, the effect was of a spacecraft descending to sit just above their heads.
As a unique set design element, the ring must rank among the most impressive pieces of kit ever rigged from the rafters of this room, and as the set unfurled it continued to reveal its secrets: toward the end, during set closer New Person, Same Old Mistakes, its innards began rippling with dozens of rotating internal lights similar to the scores that had been arranged behind the musicians in a loose semicircle.
These songs have long been memorable enough in their own right, but Parker and co invested wisely in the eye-popping stage production that has been surrounding them on this world tour for the past year. The light show is what sent this concert into the stratosphere and beyond, and helped to secure it in the memory banks as one of the all-time greats.
From original vision to live execution, this was one of the best whole-concert experiences an Australian act has engineered and delivered. Utterly state of the art, immersive and euphoric, it sent 11,500 people of all ages floating out of the room and into the rest of their lives with all the propulsion and colour of the rainbow confetti cannons that had been used in abundance. A Rushium refill is in order, stat.
Tame Impala’s Australian tour continues in Sydney on Thursday, followed by Melbourne (October 22 and 23), Adelaide (October 26) and Perth (October 29).
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